I know that I have no eye for art, but I think you should trust me on this one.
As I’ve introduced, on a work-daily basis I sit in college classrooms and repeat the proceedings. Professors lecture and prompt discussions and students engage in debate, sometimes to the quick stimulation of my gag reflex. Seriously. Professors show a lot of restraint when it comes to feilding inanity. When I was in college, people may have said stupid stuff, but now that I am considerably older, wiser and more pretentious, hearing the stupid stuff that college students say is decidedly less tolerable. I may have a Darth Vader-esque mask in front of my face, but it can only conceal so much. Sometimes my eye-rolls start before I remember I am not invisible and then I have to act like I was just going to look at the ceiling. What?
I have a confession to make. I originated this blog mostly because I wanted a forum for airing all the indignation that I am bound not to air in class. I had a real burning need to tell someone about how much smarter I am than all the people who I repeat all day. I was going to parade their folly out over the internet for ready comparison to my own smarty-smart-smart grasp on everything.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I am bothered by those people because I am that guy. I am the guy who couldn’t stop herself from thrusting her hand in the air at every chance when I was in college. I was never perceptive enough to catch it among my peers, but eyes were doubtless a-rolling each time I decided I had some super astute (read: unoriginal) interjection.
The generous angel on my left shoulder with the moustache and the harpsichord says that I am inquisitive and eager! The devil on the right says I have an inflated ego and an over developed affinity for the sound of my own voice. He’s laughing at me at this very moment for using so many pseudo-intellectual words just now!
Which brings me back to art. I am humbled and ashamed to wonder how classes would have gone if I hadn’t been opening my big mouth the whole time, all those years I was a student. (I say all those years because I feel I was equally as vociferous and arrogant in elementary school as I was as a college senior…D.A.R.E essay contest, anyone?)
These days in class, if there comes a point where I know my arm would have shot up in protest or hearty (superfluous) agreement, I listen to the moments pass the way they will without the questionable benefit of my two cents. Something at first totally frustrating----picture me, quivering behind my iron mask, unable to interpose----is now sort of comforting. I think I used to be one of those people in conversation who pretends to be listening when they are really just waiting to start talking again. I bore the need to tell people just how it was like a wooden cross. I was an ox before the cart of ineptitude. What a relief to learn something from people I would have left for idiots in my former life. Didn’t Socrates say something about how the only true knowledge is that we can know nothing? Don't I sound smart when I reference Socrates?
It just goes to show you, compulsive blabber doesn’t make you smarter, it just makes people hate you.
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4 comments:
OOh ooh ooh. Pick me pick me. Let your "humility" be impaled by my anxiously raised and now impatiently bobbing (and surprisingly lethal) hand. I just wanted to interject that I also won lame but free merchandise in said D.A.R.E. essay contest, and although we didn't attend the same elementary school, it is totally one of the reasons that we are friends. Another reason: you were that guy and I am that guy's sliding-doors style twin. I am that guy after he decided to not raise his hand in the name of respect (or equivalent bullshit). I'm the guy who sat silently rolling my eyes at every time-wasting utterance of my "peers", and bit my tongue bloody as they offered their painfully obtuse interpretations of the Tao Te Ching or the Brothers Karamazov or THEIR OWN COLLEGE APPLICATION ESSAYS!!! Yeah, we GET it. that butterfly is you. My point, my carefully plotted thesis statement: silent or vocal, maybe some people are haughty because they ARE BETTER. If the volunteer cops that ran the ill-fated and ineffectual D.A.R.E. program could see it, why can't the rest of these dimwits see it?
Not BETTER just SMARTER. Maybe.
dude/asshole,
i was AT your college classes and mostly people were not sitting in judgement they were mostly just contributing to the psychic chorus of "pleasesomeonesaysomethingsothatourshapelyandsterndantescholarprofessoressawillstoplookingpained" and if you were me maybe adding "could that person not be on the fencing team and carry with them the flippant manner, recumbant posture and smarmy command of foreign languages that that extra-curricular activity so often carries with it"
emma
i linked you. write more, please.
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